Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.
________

Note: We’ve been talking about artist statements and the evils thereof in comments here. In that vein, I thought I’d reprint the Statement of Purpose I wrote on my MFA applications way back in 2000 or so. I applied to grad school for three years. Writing the statement of purpose the first year almost made me hang myself. So I tried something else the following years. The result was the same (I didn’t get in) but the risk of self-destruction was appreciably lessened. Plus, the Chicago Review printed it, which was nice. I think that this is its online debut, though.

11 Comments

If I were a graduate admissions officer, I would have admitted you with a Statement like that. Then again, if I were a graduate admissions officer, I’d be as high as a kite on a cocktail of 13 drugs, because reviewing college applications sounds like a horrible job.

Something between joy and sorrow…a feeling inspired by a string of abstractions are adding up to something horribly concrete.
Were I in a position to argue for your submission, I’d vote yes. You have to love something just a little to be so invested in taking the piss out of it.

Art has no meaning but exists only to cause people to react, to contemplate and search for meaning in the art. Because art has no meaning, the various reactions and interpretations of those who view it reflect their personality and the nature of their sensibilities. Art needs a viewer to exist, but it is larger than the viewer. The Internet needs a mainframe to exist, yet it is larger than the mainframe. Both have a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but have also an ideal content which makes them an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought.